The eastern part of Northumberland is much covered with drift deposits, chiefly Boulder Clay, but with some beds of sand and gravel; from beneath the Boulder Clay, there rise up in many places isolated areas of sandstone belonging to the Coal Measures and Millstone Grit. On these rocky patches most of the ancient villages and the more important hamlets are built. Here the soil is dry, and springs occur at the edge of the clay. Some places are situated on the sand beds of the drift. The sites of these old settlements were determined by the surface soil, but the sites of a great number of the modern villages have been determined by the underlying minerals.

It is interesting to note that nearly all of the settlements in this district which have the characteristic old English names, such as Acklington, Bedlington, Cramlington, etc., are built upon rocky sites or upon sand. In the district lying between the River Coquet and the Tyne, and which is bounded on the west by the bottom of the Millstone Grit, there are in all twenty-three such settlements ;* thirteen of these are on rock, six on sand, and one is certainly on clay; the remaining three I do not personally know.

Throughout the district with which we are more particularly concerned, we shall find that narrow bands of clay rarely have villages, and even houses are scarce. Wide areas of clay are thinly populated, whilst on the intermediate formations of sand or limestone villages abound.

The object of this paper, however, is not so much to examine the actual sites of the villages, although we shall see that in certain cases this is a very important point; but I shall endeavour to show that a relation also exists between the boundaries of the parishes to which these villages give their names, and the great physical features caused by the outcropping of certain strata. This relation I shall illustrate by the Chalk area of England as a whole and its immediate border; coming afterwards to describe in greater detail the Chalk and Greensand areas around that district in the south-east of England, which is known as the Weald.

My information as to the parish boundaries is derived from the index to the Tithe Survey, which is the one-inch Ordnance Map with boundaries inserted. Tythings, liberties, etc., when separately marked, are here considered as parishes.

It is manifest that the chief interest of this question lies in the light which it may be supposed to throw upon our early history, and I presume that it is only for this reason that such a paper as this is accepted by the Anthropological Institute. I feel sure that when fully investigated, this subject will give most * Taking the names as marked upon the one inch Ordnance Mar. VOL. III.

D

important aid in historical research. There is one advantage which the facts I now beg to lay before you have over the great mass of material with which historians have to deal. They are absolutely true, and any error connected with them can only lie in our imperfect interpretation. Mr. Kemble well tells us "how the profoundest science halts after the reality of ancient ages, and strives in vain to reduce their manifold falsehood to a truth."* The historical data which we are now to examine can contain no falsehooods, but only absolute facts, which our forefathers have stamped on the great land divisions of the country. Whilst, however, the chief interest of this question lies in its historical relations, I shall only very briefly allude to this point, but shall content myself with laying the facts before you, leaving their application to others, better fitted than I for this important task.

As the term escarpment is one which I shall often have occasion to use, it may be as well here to give an explanation of it. The word has long been in use in geological works, and by the earlier writers it was employed to denote any hill that had a sharp slope or scarp; but of late years it has acquired a more restricted meaning, and it is now applied only to hills of one particular kind. Mr. Whitaker has perhaps given the best definition of it, as now used: "It may be defined as 'the bounding ridge' of a formation or bed, that is to say, the ridge along which a formation or bed is cut off, and beyond which it does not extend, except in the form of outliers; it follows the line of strike." Hence we see, that whilst an escarpment is necessarily a hill, all hills are not escarpments.

An escarpment is composed along its whole length of one particular bed or group of beds, and the lower ground at the foot of the escarpment is composed of different beds, geologically lower than the others. In geological language, the beds "dip" into the escarpment, and disappear beneath the beds of which the escarpment is composed, the latter also "dipping" in the same direction. The crest of the escarpment is always the highest ground in the neighbourhood, and from it the country falls gently away to the lower ground, or until another line of escarpment comes on.

As an important point connected with our subject, we may note that escarpments are generally composed of porous rocks, consequently the land upon them is dry. Generally, too, the lower ground at the foot of an escarpment is composed of im

"The Saxons in England," vol. i, p. 4.

"Memoirs of the Geological Survey," vol. iv, The Geology of the Lon. don Basin, p. 357. Some sketches of the Chalk escarpment are given in this memoir, and the range of the escarpment is described.

*

pervious clay, and therefore the land upon it is naturally wet. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but all the escarpments of which I have now to speak are mainly composed of porous

rocks.

In the sections given on plate IV (p. 42), the escarpments of the Chalk, Upper Greensand, and Lower Greensand are shown. A simple inspection of these will give a better idea of an escarpment than any verbal description.

In picturing to ourselves the ancient condition of England, and in endeavouring to restore the characters of its various districts as they existed some twelve or fifteen centuries ago, we are very apt to be misled by relying too much upon the present character of the surface, and the names of certain districts. Thus, as regards the area once covered by thick forest; any good map of England will show a succession of so-called forests along the outcrop of the New Red Sandstone, and we are apt to suppose that the whole of that area was remarkable for its woodlands, and that those we now know are but the remains of the great primeval forest. We should probably obtain a more accurate notion of the ancient condition of the land, if we carefully considered the distribution of the soils, and the elevation, aspect, etc., of the various districts. We should then find that the forest lands of modern England are not those which would have been most thickly wooded centuries ago; generally quite the reverse of this. The parts now known as forests are chiefly those in which the ancient woods were least thick. Fine timber may have grown there, as now, but the underwood and the denser forest growth, which chiefly impede the settlement of a country, would have been less thick there than on the heavier soils.

The tracts now known as forests, are mainly those in which the woodland was least worth clearing; the land lay for a long time in a wild uncultivated state, outside the settled and appropriated land-hence the term "forest."

We cannot have a better example of this than the Weald. It is well known that the whole of this area was a vast woodland tract the forest of Anderida; and we often hear that the"forests" of Ashdown, St. Leonard's, etc., are the remains of the old forest. So in truth they are, but they give us no adequate idea of that old forest; for anyone acquainted with the Weald knows that the sandy land of these districts does not produce a thick crop of underwood-or at any rate so thick a crop as the stiffer lands now under cultivation. The densest parts of Anderida were the

The Lias, for instance, generally forms a low escarpment around the New Red Sandstone; here the face of the escarpment is composed of shales and thin limestones, the base generally of more porous beds.

clay lands, where only patches of wood now remain. The parts now known as forest were those least thickly wooded.

The present condition of the New Forest is another good example; we see there that the wood grows thickest over the heavier soils. Probably, ere long, these heavier soils, being the best adapted for tillage, will be in great part cleared, and only the light and poorer soils will remain as forest land. But these will give a very false idea of the forest as we now know it.

We may then fairly conclude that the low-lying clayey lands of England were in early times very thickly wooded.

The lighter lands of moderate elevation were probably also in great part covered with wood, but not to so great an extent as the heavier soils, nor were the woods so thick.

England is parted into two great natural divisions, by what is sometimes called the "central plain" of England. On Geological Maps it is represented by the area coloured as New Red Sandstone and Lias. The summit levels of these formations very rarely exceed five hundred feet above the sea, and over most of their area the height of the ground is much less than three hundred feet. There are subordinate ranges of comparatively high ground traversing this area-particularly over the sandstones and conglomerates of the New Red Sandstone; but as a whole, and as compared with the area on either side, it is a plain.

To the west and north-west of this plain, there are the great mountain ranges of England and Wales, formed by the older geological formations-of this district I shall have nothing to say. To the east and south of the great plain there are a succession of hills and smaller plains, which we must now briefly

describe.

The Liassic plain is nearly always bounded on the south and east by a bold line of hills, which Geologists term the Oolitic escarpment. The Cotswold Hills are part of this Oolitic escarpment; a great part of the crest is over eight hundred feet in height, and two points exceed a thousand feet. The face of the escarpment is generally exceedingly steep; sometimes, where the freestone of the Inferior Oolite occurs, it is quite precipitous. This, as we shall presently see, is an important point. The face of the escarpment is deeply indented with a succession of coombs and valleys, many of which are thickly clothed with wood, especially beech. From the summit of the Cotswolds (the crest of the escarpment), the ground falls away with a gentle slope to the south. The natural condition of this great plateau or table land is that of open downs, on which enormous quantities of sheep have been fed. Of late years a great change has been coming over the face of the country, and now we find that large areas

are being brought under the plough. In passing from the crest of the escarpment down the "dip slope" of the beds, we sometimes come to rather wet and stiff land formed by some more clayey beds. But in the low ground, forming a well-marked plain or valley, is the far more important wet land of the Oxford Clay. This is separated from the Oolitic country we have just been considering, by a band of limestone, known as the Cornbrash. All through its course this bed is characterised by yielding a rich arable soil. It rarely spreads over any great extent of country, but generally occupies only a narrow band. It is remarkable for the number of villages which are built upon it, and thus it forms a fertile and well populated border to the sterile and comparatively thinly populated Oxford Clay.*

This clay forms a broad band of stiff and wet land largely laid out in pasture. To the south-east of this there is another escarpment formed by the Coral Rag-of far less height than the Cotswolds. Sometimes there is another broad band of clay-the Kimmeridge Clay, beyond this another escarpment of the Lower Greensand, then a band of Gault clay, and finally, overlooking all these, is the great escarpment of the Chalk.

In east Yorkshire the Lower Oolites form even more important features than they do in the west of England, rising to a greater height and spreading over a wider space. This high land is separated from the Yorkshire Wolds by the clay lands of the Vale of Pickering.

Over the greater part of the eastern moorlands of Yorkshire, formed by the Lower Oolitic rocks, there are extensive prehistoric remains, and the same thing occurs over the Cotswold Hills. Contrasting the abundance of such remains over these areas with the absence of them over the clayey districts, and recalling too the fact that the natural soil for thick woodland is clay, we are warranted in concluding that the primitive condition of these high lands did not greatly differ from that which we now ob

serve.

The facts to be detailed in this paper can best be seen by an examination of the Chalk escarpment; we will therefore now describe that.

The Chalk escarpment is one of the best marked physical features in England. It is a steep-sided range of hills, having its summits remarkably level. From the crest of the escarpment the ground falls gradually away with a slope only very little

* These remarks refer to those parts of England where the drift deposits are unimportant or absent. Where the country is thickly covered with drift, the distribution of the population is wholly governed by that, and has no relation to the underlying rock. In the districts to which this paper especially refers, the drift deposits are not of great importance, and do not much obscure the features of the rocks.